


Don't Carry It All

by thewindupbird



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Werewolf
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-21
Updated: 2012-11-21
Packaged: 2017-11-19 05:11:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/569476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewindupbird/pseuds/thewindupbird
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus takes comfort in Sirius's memory before his monthly transformation, but this time it may do him more harm than good.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Carry It All

**Author's Note:**

  * For [letsgogetlost](https://archiveofourown.org/users/letsgogetlost/gifts), [who listens to me whinge more than she has to](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=who+listens+to+me+whinge+more+than+she+has+to).



> Fic title from the Decemberists song of the same title, from the album The King is Dead

Remus Lupin has always hated his freckles. They are rather pale, it’s true, pale enough that one doesn’t notice them immediately on his face - a smattering across his nose, at the outer corners of his eyes, but on the paler skin of his body, they are more visible.

 

As a teenager, he felt they made him vulnerable looking, almost feminine - somehow too soft. And too young. Like he was still all scraped knees and elbows and awkward angles.

 

But mostly, they are a reminder of his humanity, which is disorienting and almost perverse as night falls like a promise or a curse, and the light of the full moon creeps slowly, slowly across the water-stained cement of the basement of his new house, with its leaky kitchen faucet and it’s uneven floorboards. Soon it will cover his naked body where he sits. Hunched on the bed, hands clutching the edges of the mattress.

 

It is disorienting because he will sit here, the small of his back protesting at the angle of body hunched over his legs, and stare down at the freckles on his thighs, and everything about him now looks so different from the wolf, but _is_ the wolf all the same. Skin stretches over tendon and bone and muscle, tight and quivering, apprehensive of the moon. It is only minutes away now.

 

The freckles make him seem so _young_ somehow, which, Remus thinks, is a lie. And they look strange and ugly against his greying hair and he thinks _‘only children have freckles,’_ though he knows this is absurd, but they feel like a betrayal and he can’t help but hate them. They show an innocence, somehow, that he does not feel he has. One which he lost a long time ago.

 

Remus learned quickly that the world could be cruel. Sirius--

 

_Oh God,_

He misses Sirius. He misses Sirius’s fingers tracing his skin when they were eighteen, the freckles along his collarbone, “They’re so _pale_ ,” he’d said, wonderingly.

 

“Well. Yes.” Remus had replied, not caring enough to be clever at that hour of the morning, with the sun just coming in through the window, skin tingling with sex and Sirius’s hands.

 

And then, after Azkaban… things were different. Of course they were different.  With Sirius’s wrecked body, spindle-thin and covered in tattoos and markings he didn’t understand - that they never spoke about. It was harder to talk then, after all those years. The silences had become too vast for them to breach. He even misses that.

 

Some of the things that had fallen apart in the years just before Voldemort fell for the first time had never been put back together. Perhaps there would never be enough time in the world for that, but it didn’t seem to matter those times with Sirius seated crosslegged at the end of the bed, letting his rough fingers slide down Remus’s shin to his heel, cupping his calf on the way back up.

 

“C’mere,” Remus had murmured to him, and Sirius, who could never sleep well anymore, stretched out beside him and lay his head on Remus’s belly, cradled against the bottom of his ribcage, his legs curled up to his body, both to accommodate him on the bed, and because Sirius had never slept freely after Azkaban. He was always turned into himself. There had been a new hunch to his shoulders that spoke nothing of carefree boyish laziness.

 

“These two are new,” he had said, touching two of those tiny freckles on the inside of Remus’s raised thigh with his fingertips, and Remus’s heart broke into pieces because how would Sirius _know_ that, after twelve years? That these two freckles, in the mess of scars and flecked skin: _these two_ are new.

 

So he’d laughed, rough and soft, because he didn’t trust himself to speak, and tangled his fingers in Sirius’s long, dark hair.

 

There had been so many times, so many memories after that, and they hurt Remus just as much as the change. He can feel it coming, his blood thrumming now, the moon has begun to cover the wall behind him. He closes his eyes against its brightness. People don’t realise how bright the moon is, how bright it can seem - but then his pupils are caught between human and wolf and he can feel the hair on his arms and legs and neck rise. The change will be upon him any second now.

 

For a moment, as he pushes himself with a  soft groan from the bed to the cold floor and his limbs start to quake and shudder. He shuts his eyes tight and remembers what it feels like to have Sirius’s hands roaming his body, how it could make the fine hairs on his body raise like this, but in such a different way-- remembers Sirius’s tongue _oh_ , just there, between the bones at the base of his spine and then the change comes, and he can’t remember anything at all.

 

As the wolf he bites and gnaws at his paws and at his belly, for lack of anything else to bite and gnaw. There is an itch in his blood he can’t shake that needs to hunt and to kill. His own blood coating his tongue abates that urge a little, like a drug. With his muzzle buried in his belly, teeth sharp against the soft flesh, claws scraping for leverage on the floor he notices something, in the places where he has torn the grey fur from his skin. The two brown dots, directly across from one another on the inside of his hind leg.

 

_These two are new._

The wolf mourns in ways Remus never allows himself to, with anger and violence. In the morning, too cold to even shiver, he thinks he must be alive through sheer determination. He can’t die in that monster’s body. And yet somehow, after slipping in and out of consciousness on the cement floor for hours, he wakes up, sick and aching, and his joints scream as he pulls himself onto the bed, and wraps himself in thin white sheets.

 

He survives, somehow. He always does, and drags himself upstairs, bloodied, a mess, and runs the shower. He sits on the floor of the tub for a long time, until the hot water turns cold against his spine, and sobs against his freckled knees.


End file.
